5 Free Resources You Can Use To Beautify Your Blog Posts

Admittedly, you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover. But if you land on a blog post and see daunting blocks of dense, uninterrupted text, you’re probably not going to read it, are you?

There’s good reason for that. According to research, 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text. Readers aren’t just interested in what you have to say: they’re also interested in how you present it.

If you want to keep eyeballs on your articles, you need to make them visually appealing. Here’s 5 free (yup, fully free) resources you can use to do so.

1. Canva

Canva is an absolute godsend. An easy to use (but feature-rich) image editing platform, it’s the kind of tool that makes you want to hug its creators.

In its own words, Canva is “amazingly simple graphic design software”. Believe us: that’s true. You won’t need any training to get to work using Canva – its drag and drop system makes editing intuitive.

Usability aside, Canva is packed with goodies that will make your blog posts pop. It comes with a vast array of custom templates, spanning social media posts, documents, blogging, emails, ads, and just about anything else you can think of. That’s not to mention all the inbuilt images, icons and fonts.

Seriously, give it a go and prepare to become an instant artist.

You might also like: GIMP, Pixlr, PicMonkey

2. Iconfinder

A small company with huge clout, Iconfinder offers a vast selection of icon sets. It’s all about “helping designers make a living doing what they love” – and it definitely hits the mark.

Iconfinder is pretty darn easy to use. It has a main interface not dissimilar to Google’s, meaning that searching through its abundance of icons is pain-free. Most searches will pull up thousands of icons and icon sets, and you can filter your results to quickly find what you’re looking for.

Even better, icons can be downloaded in various file formats and sizes. Have a look for yourself – you’ll be spoilt for choice.

You might also like: Entypo, FindIcons, Iconspedia

3. Font Squirrel

Font Squirrel is a “free font utopia”. The good guys behind the site have trawled through the world of freeware to find quality typefaces for our commercial use, and they’ve done a thorough job.

There’s a plethora of cool fonts to take your pick from. Plus, they’re all broken down into clear design categories for ease of use, and downloading takes seconds. Oh, and while you’re on the site, you might also want to check out its cool font identifier feature, too.

For anyone looking for distinctive fonts to make blog graphics stand out, this is the place to be.

You might also like: DaFont, FontSpace, Urbanfonts

4. Piktochart

Infographics are the new black. And fortunately, they don’t have to be expensive or laborious to produce. (Not with free tools like Piktochart, that is.)

A web-based infographic tool with a ton of templates, Piktochart is both easy to access and easy to use. It comes with a great library of icons, pictograms and ready to use graphics that make designing quick and easy – no matter what your level of skill.

You can even import data from spreadsheets to create custom graphs… impressive, right? Seriously, if you want to spice up your blog post without the laborious design effort, you’ll love Piktochart.

You might also like: Venngage, easel.ly, inforgr.am

5. Unsplash

Nowadays, there’s no excuse for bad stock imagery. There’s a whole world of great photography sites out there, packed with high quality, non-cheesy images that you can download for free.

We’ve chosen Unsplash for its beautiful collections and breath-taking imagery. Setting this site apart is its variety: images come from a range of photographers, meaning there’s an incredible spectrum of styles, themes and subjects.

Kudos to the people out there who share their skills for free.

You might also like: Death to the Stock Photo, Life of Pix, Gratisography, Pexels

Well, that’s plenty of resources to be cracking on with, wouldn’t you say? Good luck beautifying your blog posts!